The writing's on the wall

I was born in West Yorkshire. I remember, as a callow youth, struggling through the gorse and heather on Keighley Moor, after my first ever visit to the Bronte's home village as a qualified driver, looking for cup and ring marks. I found some. I thought they were deadly boring to look at. I was profoundly impressed that they were there though. A continuity with the past. Imagine, someone, in their idle moments, a few thousand years ago, had chosen to leave their mark in the stone. If there had been mobile phones there might have been neither cups nor rings. We've got something similar, more impressive actually, on La Centenera Hill - the stone carvings the petroglyphs - here in Pinoso. Out at Monte Arabí near Yecla there are more. We humans, be we Tykes, Pinoseros and Yeclanos seem to want to mark our passing. My own initials are carved in the, "it's a school tradition don't you know", stone bench alongside the playing fields of my old grammar school - CJT 1969.

Carving is one way we do it but I suppose if I were to think prehistoric art I would instantly think cave paintings. Ochre and red antelopes, people with bows and arrows, hand prints, buffalo or bison, and, of course, penises - big penises. Male artists perhaps? We had very similar drawings on the back of the toilet doors at that same school. When I've been in the ethnological museums in Yecla and Jumilla there are maps of prehistoric sites in Murcia - Mortalla, Calasparra, Cieza and Mula for instance. In Alicante there are, Google tells me, 28 sites. Close to Pinoso we have the paintings over at Monte Arabí, on the same hill as those petroglyphs I mentioned earlier. To see some of the paintings, the pinturas rupestres, the best way is to book one of the regular guided tours from the Yecla tourist office but there are some paintings that you can visit anytime. They are protected from the rain by the overhanging cliff and from we humans by a big iron grille. There are more "cave paintings" at la Sarga and the Alcoy tourist office arranges a lot of visits there. The only other ones I've been to locally (well nearly nearby) are at Alpera just into Albacete province. There you have to ring someone to arrange a mutually convenient time. When I went the time was apparently only mutually convenient to me and the guide which made it a good visit. 

I'd never really made the link but, as is so often the case I heard a podcast that did. The link that is between those wall paintings and the stuff we see daubed all over the modern urban landscape. The bison and antelope at Sagra are painted with pigments made from water, animal fat, faeces, resin, crushed rocks and plants while the designs produced at the "Urban Art" event at the Cigarreras Centre in Alicante this summer used Krylon Color Master spray paint. In my opinion the work being produced there was a bit second rate but my opinion may have been coloured by the deafening, so-called, Urban Music that some very young DJs were producing at the same time. I did, though, enjoy a guided tour around Petrer that I did, just before Covid made things different. It was a guided visit to look at wall art in the town; the graffiti. Each year, at the ARTenBITRIR event in Petrer, they find new walls to let local artists loose on. Not the tagging stuff, the pictorial stuff. I don't really know much about tagging, the script based graffiti, the graffiti signatures. I'm sure there is some etiquette to it, honour among thieves and all that, but to me the tags often look like so much scrawl. Urban vandalism on any vertical surface that stays long enough to attract spray paint. The wall art can be good though. Petrer promotes it as does Monóvar - in fact it's all over the place in Spain and probably everywhere. I noticed, for instance that the Alicante tourist office has produced an online leaflet with the easy to decipher tile of Ruta Arte Urbano, San Antón, Alicante.

Plenty to gawp at then, from the prehistoric to the very urban only a few kilometres from home.

Fat man and petroglyphs on La Centenera 

Pinturas rupestres on Monte Arabí, Yecla. This is the organised tour

This is the overhang where the wall paintings are at La Sarga. Alcoy tourist office organises regular visits

If you go to Monte Arabí near Yecla for the "always available" cave paintings this is the cliff face you're looking for. Where the rock is orange, at the left hand side, you can just about see, in the photo, an arch with a grille over it. That's where they are.